“Woodmead Retail Park provides an ideal opportunity to enhance Growthpoint’s portfolio of quality properties located throughout South Africa,” says Growthpoint Properties Limited’s Retail Portfolio Divisional Director Stephan le Roux.

Le Roux elaborates that Woodmead Retail Park has all the important ingredients that make a retail centre a successful property asset: a good location, excellent exposure, great access, a comprehensive tenant mix, a quality physical product and, especially in this case, a relatively affluent customer base within a catchment area which reaches as far as Midrand on the North East.

Located in the established Woodmead retail node, which comprises a number of big box wholesale and retail destination outlets (Value Mart, Woodlands, Value Centre and Makro), Woodmead Retail Park extends and complements the existing offering. It enjoys enviable visibility with frontage on the N1 and M1 Highways through one of the busiest highway interchanges in South Africa, the Buccleuch interchange.

Great news for commuters as well as consumers, the development will also see a welcome upgrade to the roads accessing Woodmead Retail Park from Woodmead Drive, and will also provide some 2,000 parking bays to serve shoppers.

Growthpoint’s Steve Grupel (Retail Leasing) notes that the centre is effectively fully let and anchored by Pick ‘n Pay (15,300m2) – the only Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket located between Northgate and Norwood and one of the top three largest in South Africa and  Woolworths (3,000m2) which includes this leading retailer’s food, clothing, home and café concepts and is the only full line Woolworths to be located in a centre of this kind.

A quality development in every aspect, Woodmead Retail Park encompasses lifestyle and value with a vibrant mix of home, fashion, food and service related tenants. Dis-Chem (1,500m2) is expected to be a major draw card and together with Dion Wired, all three Mr Price concepts: Home, Sport and Clothing, Toys R Us, Ackermans, and banks, Standard and FNB as well as  Nedbank and ABSA ATM’s. It includes various retail highlights and social interaction nodes including a covered café courtyard, featuring Mugg & Bean, Fournos and the Woolworths Café, and a vibrant fast food node, including Al’s Gourmet Chicken, Debonairs and Fego Café, amongst others.

All the centre’s tenants have been provided with emergency electrical power and will have a minimum supply to continue trading even during power cuts. Woodmead Retail Park’s stand-alone motor dealerships, McCarthy Toyota and McCarthy Nissan, are set to open within a few weeks of the centre.

Incorporating lifestyle tenants usually found in enclosed shopping malls, its design also sets aside Woodmead Retail Park as unique from conventional value centres, with a quality structure featuring natural textures using environmentally sound raw material and detail design elements such as packed stone. Woodmead Retail Park also takes an unconventional approach to landscaping with a variety of colours, textures and heights of indigenous plants used to create unique geometries and stylised visual landscaping.

Developed by Investec Property, Growthpoint will take ownership of Woodmead Retail Park at opening. This will be its second prime retail asset in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, complementing Growthpoint’s 50% ownership of Northgate together with Sasol Pension Fund. Growthpoint Properties Limited is currently South Africa’s largest JSE-listed property holding and investment company, with some 430 prime property assets valued in excess of R24 billion. This includes nearly a million square metres of retail space located in 52 shopping centres throughout South Africa.

“We expect Woodmead Retail Park to trade well, notwithstanding the current slowdown in the retail market, and anticipate a shorter settling period to that of  similar centres as a result of the sound principles which have been, adopted” explains le Roux.